Identity Loss: Polarized Expertise & Fragmented Media

In order for system to work, though, the masses are expected to trust the experts to decide, or “dictate,” which direction is necessary for the continuation of the United States’ existence. By definition, democratic America believes that “comparable” equal opportunity should be ensured to everyone. In the eyes of Andrew Carnegie, the wealthy should be in charge of America’s finances and policies due to the fact they are the ones who earned their wealth wisely, therefore they would be able to reciprocate that in spending. Carnegie just believed that the poor frivolously unable to retain any form of wealth. Carnegie’s objective of justice in this expertise basis would be compatible with Danielle Allen’s conceptualization that experts are to manage the desires of the masses and its consequences to guarantee social wellbeing. However, Allen also notes in her questioning of trust in American democracy how experts promised people individual sovereignty, but there isn’t much evidence that it is delivered. She explains why this is, in her description of one of experts’ major fears as, the masses ability to have and access public speech. A government expert’s worse nightmare would be that a verbal rebellion might destabilize the peace of the community, revealing that any social relationship with the media would keep the government on it’s toes.
Tocqueville’s intuition on American democracy and trust foretold how the application of an expertise basis to legitimize the American government as an institution would cause a citizen to become lazy and focused on the individual rather than the individual in a community. The Tocquevillian tradeoff concisely conceptualizes that because expertise and the long-term vision of the aristocrats tr...

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...nservative, experts began arguing over who is more politically correct. When the mass-produced media started reporting “with a ceaseless flow of fast changing and barely explained events,” curbed people’s interest and trust, especially people who typically avoid news and political participation. This caused a decline in trust of their political institutions due to the negative mass-produced media image of their “suppose-to-be-an-expert,” as well as the other people. The masses must have felt like William Jennings Bryan when the gold standard debate was getting heated around the origins of the expertise model in America, as the rich continue chasing their virtue of commerce. What occurred is that the poor, or less well-off, lost their will to identify with any other group and they couldn’t identify with their expert as the way in which news is told is ruining that.